1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a structured document creating application, and more particularly, to an information processing apparatus, an information processing method, and a program, which enable efficient editing of a stylesheet such as CSS defining the style of a structured document such as HTML.
2. Description of the Related Art
Cascading style sheets (hereinafter referred to as “CSS”) defining the detailed layout of a page plays an important role in designing a portal site, a web application, or a homepage. The CSS specifications have been defined by W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) recommendations. W3C recommended CSS Level 2 (CSS 2) in 1998, and W3C candidate recommendation of CSS Level 2 Revision 1 (CSS 2.1) and the draft of Level 3 (CSS 3) are now available and continue to further expand.
CSS is configured to include definitions of style that specify modifications to elements in a structured document described in HTML, XML, XHTML, or other markup language, making it possible to define information related to the layout, such as font and font size, font modifier, and line spacing, separately from the document body. Thus, CSS makes it possible to switch stylesheets depending on the display medium on which pages are displayed, such as either a personal computer or a personal digital assistant, and superimpose the effects of styles respectively defined by a user agent, a site creator, and a user who browses the site.
On the other hand, various sophisticated web authoring tools, such as Homepage Builder®, WebSphere® Studio Application Developer, Rational® Application Developer for WebSphere® Software, Microsoft® FrontPage®, and Adobe® Dreamweaver®, have been offered in recent years. The above-mentioned web authoring tools have a function for editing the CSS by a menu selection method or a direct code description method, enabling definition of style for a portal site, a web application, or a homepage in a unified way.
Use of the conventional CSS editing function may cause a problem upon designing pages if a creator does not have sufficient understanding of what kinds of CSS classes have already been defined, and duplicate definitions specifying the same modifier often occur, and unintentionally added definitions increase the number of class definitions.
Further, even if trying to find a class specifying a desired modification from predefined classes, since the conventional CSS editing function provides only a GUI with a list of classes related to all or certain tags, the creator has to check line by line in order to find the desired class from the list. Thus, the conventional CSS editing function is not enough from the standpoint of user friendliness. In other words, the conventional web authoring tools are not able to make sufficient use of reusability as an excellent feature of CSS class specification.